The Depot

A few months back, I was driving home from the grocery store on 28th street in Minneapolis and passed the East Phillips Depot building, an abandoned distribution warehouse. Surrounding it were signs, flyers, and leaflets reading things like "no demo!" and "urban farm not toxic harm." One thing, in particular, stood out for me: someone had spelled out the word "imagine" in scraps of knotted fabric and tied it to the chain link fence surrounding the parking lot. It spoke to me, and that is the idea that informs my project.

 I tried to imagine how I, as a designer, could transform that space into a hub for community building rather than a diesel station for the city's trucks, as the city has planned. I started by asking myself three basic questions I found all around me that day: what should a neighborhood look like on 28th St.?; what can uplift the voices of its marginalized communities?; and how can we address food insecurity in an urban area? With these questions in mind, I designed floor plans and built a model to demonstrate how design can be an active instrument of community building.

 Instead of beginning with destruction, as the city had planned, I began with reconstruction and designed a community center that preserved the original shell of the Roof Depot. I designed the building with an expansive covered greenspace where people could congregate even in the dead of a Minnesota winter. Spanning the sides of the greenspace are incubator spaces for startup businesses from the neighborhood. A small grocery store and an adjacent hydroponic farm provide fresh produce to the community year-round. The building also houses community classrooms, a collaborative workspace, and a wellness center that the entire community can utilize. There is also affordable housing on the upper floors with intimate balconies and access to shared greenspaces and community gardens.

 My project serves as a vision of the future that invests in diverse communities in ways that build on the ideas of the people who live there. I believe this kind of collaborative reinvisioning is desperately needed in American cities like Minneapolis, which are plagued by a history of racial and economic segregation.

Artist Statement